Fighting games are great because they’re a conversation between the two players that happens without words. Learning each other’s tendencies, bad habits, and quirks that make each other’s style unique is what makes fighting games so fun.
Some characters are designed to capitalize on those tendencies and shut them down specifically. Usually, these characters are built to check how much a player knows about them, or they’re designed to restrict a normal game plan. They can be fun to use, but extremely frustrating to fight against.
10 Dhalsim
Dhalsim from Street Fighter is the prime example of a character designed to frustrate his opponent. His moves stretch across the screen and deal more damage than fireballs, meaning he can trade with them freely since he’ll come out on top. He can stop jump-ins from almost a full screen away, and his fireballs control space to restrict his opponent from moving forward.
As if all of that weren’t enough, Dhalsim also has an invincible teleport that can get him out of tough spots, and mix his opponents up. That being said, Dhalsim is weak when the opponent gets in his face since his moves are slow and the damage usually isn’t too great. He’s designed to whittle away at his opponent slowly and crumbles when they apply pressure to him.
9 Blanka
Blanka is a classic “knowledge check” character designed to use his mobility to frustrate opponents who try to predict what he’ll do. In fighting games, there’re only so many things players can look out for at once whether it be a jumping attack, a low sweep, a dash throw, or whatever else characters can throw out. Blanka is able to do all these things and more, to drive his opponent insane.
He even has a costume in Street Fighter V that makes him look like a cute mascot. The costume was purposefully included to frustrate his opponents since he seems to make fun of them as he jumps around the screen and screams his nonsensical beastly noises.
8 Yuzuriha
Yuzuriha is a character built around similar principles to Dhalsim. She has long-ranged attacks, a teleport to make her opponents guess, and is weaker in close range combat. Even though the design is similar, she has her own quirks as well.
For one, her teleport is cancellable into other moves that can make her opponent guess what side she’ll end on and whether her attack will hit high or low. Yuzuriha’s design is more like a rush-down version of Dhalsim, which can be very annoying to deal with, but just requires a bit of patience.
7 Yoshimitsu
This character from the Tekken series is another mobility-based character with the move set of a joke character. He’s able to run away and close distance very quickly, use his sword like a helicopter to fly at his opponents, and butt-slam onto them for a lot of damage. All of these things make for a character that checks what his opponent knows, and even if they know what’s happening, it’s hard to stop.
He also has a lightning-fast counter that can deter pressure at the cost of his own health. If the counter succeeds, he gets some of the biggest combos in the game so players fighting him need to be extra careful.
6 Samus Aran
In Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, few characters are abused as much as Samus Aran. There’s nothing wrong with playing a zoning play style but Samus’ frustrating kit combined with Smash Ultimate‘s design makes for a scary combo. Her charge shot deals a lot of damage and also has great kill potential. On top of that, her missiles allow her to lock her opponents down while charging the charge shot, to start the pressure over again.
Smash Ultimate has a slow shield animation, meaning players have to preemptively put their shields up to block her projectiles, instead of as a reaction. Since players can’t react, they can’t parry the projectiles and have to eat shield damage either way, even if they don’t get hit. Samus can be played as a rush-down character or a zoner, and this ability to switch mid-game can frustrate even the most stoic of players.
5 Green Lantern
Green Lantern was a very solid character in the first Injustice: Gods Among Us. He had a few projectiles to control space, long-range combos to help him get in, and quick mix-ups to land hits on his opponent. The only problem was his mix-ups in his strings were extremely quick to the point of players having to guess instead of reacting. Because his buttons moved him forward so much, the mix-up could be initiated from pretty far away without any set-up, which didn’t feel fair in a lot of matchups.
On top of that, if he decided to burn meter on his projectiles, the damage he could deal from full screen was immense. All of this together made for a character nobody wanted to fight against because a lot of characters didn’t have the tools to deal with him.
4 Sheeva
Sheeva in Mortal Kombat 11 is by no means overpowered, but a lot of fans seem to think so because of her tool kit. She has an unblockable overhead stomp, strong command grabs, and some of the highest damage combos off stray hits. All of these tools together make for a strong character, but they’re not insurmountable. Players have to learn how to fight Sheeva in a way that’s unlike other characters, which is pretty frustrating.
RELATED: 10 Fighting Game Characters You Didn’t Know Were Based On Real People
It’s especially difficult since she’s DLC and if players don’t own her, they can’t practice against her in training mode to learn how to avoid her gimmicks. With the ability for players to create their own move sets in Mortal Kombat 11, Sheeva players embraced how infuriating she was to fight and created some of the cheapest set-ups ever seen in Mortal Kombat history, until she was rightfully nerfed.
3 Yoda
Yoda was a character who broke the rules of Soul Calibur just because of his stature alone. Soul Calibur IV was focused on movement and restricting the opponent’s movement as much as possible. Yoda was exempt from a lot of set-ups and attacks because of how small he was. Moves would whiff over his head and certain grabs couldn’t start because he was too low to the ground for them to detect his hit box. On top of this, he had crazy mobility that allowed him to run circles around his opponents while hacking away at their shins.
2 Ultra Instinct Goku
Ultra Instinct Goku has everything any player could need to gain an advantage in Dragon Ball FighterZ. He’s got an invincible reversal, the best buttons in the game, meta-defining assists, and the list goes on. The thing that makes him so infuriating is that he literally has everything. And if there’s a tool he doesn’t have, he’s got something better to cover for it anyways.
Bandai Namco has acknowledged this and rebalanced him a bit recently, but he’s still absurdly strong and useful for team composition. It was difficult to punish him on a lot of things that other characters could get punished for, so it felt like he was breaking a lot of the rules of the game, which upset a lot of players.
1 Dark Phoenix
Dark Phoenix as a character really doesn’t leave much to say in terms of being frustrating. In Ultimate Marvel Vs. Carom 3, her power to revive mixed with the power of X-Factor lead to straight-up game-breaking interactions. This meant that if a player was able to kill off their opponent’s team but left Phoenix alive, the game was far from over.
Buffed Dark Phoenix was capable of killing any character in one hit, no questions asked. She also gained access to mix-ups that players couldn’t react to and were forced to guess if she was able to snap characters in. This made playing against a team with Dark Phoenix a nightmare that players still dream about today.
![\"IT電腦補習](\"http://itteacheritfreelance.hk/test/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/logo2-2.png\"){kind=logo}
www.itsec.hk
www.itsec.vip
www.itseceu.uk
Leave a Reply